This is a live hand in a London Casino. The place was a little busier than the norm. The regs seemed to be drinking more than usual (Tough week perhaps?!). The atmosphere was more playful, less serious and I was happy to go with that flow.

Opponent appears to be a poor semi-loose passive player. I don't know too much about her. Seems like she'd sat down after having a successful spin up on the roulette tables, although she was certainly no degen. That's questionable as she was playing house games! (: She's playing overall around ~25% VPIP/15% PFR/1.0 AF over the last 1-2 hours, so maybe ~100 hands. She's not distracted, somewhat attentive. I get the feeling this is a comfortable scenario for my opponent.

Looking back there are some things I would've done differently during the hand, but that's just me. What do you think?

curiosity: How do you know she's approx. 25/15/1.0: do you take notes at every hand and then do quick computation or do you guesstimate this? (I rarely play live and although I'm familiar with these stats online, it's one thing I've got a lot of problems with when playing live: that is, I cannot easily tell which type of player I'm playing against when I'm playing live... )
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TacticalCoderFeb 28 '12 at 17:22

Like you say I'm estimating, and I only take mental notes. I do my best to stay alert, be accurate and watch everything. For VPIP I count hands played per orbit along with SD hands which I extrapolate ranges from. PFR is just a subset of this, looking for frequency of calls to raises to guess ranges. AF is a post-flop stat (a ratio), where I count for raises vs calls for each street. It's can be alot at first but it gets easier. Knowing the formulas, along with a lot of experience makes my estimates better. Though, table dynamics will affect this heavily.
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Toby Booth♦Feb 28 '12 at 21:47

eh eh, I know about VPIP/PFR/AF and whatnots (I'm a tracker & HUD developer ; ) My question was really how to narrow those values down to some range when playing "real live" poker.
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TacticalCoderFeb 28 '12 at 22:14

The (my) method is nuanced, but I've no doubt you know that. What I can say is that I memorized the hand combinations that make up the top 50% of all hands for a few categorization methods (Pokerstove, Sklansky-Chubukov, PokerProTools) so by seeing one hand I get a baseline of what a potential range looks like. The more hands I see, the more accurate I get. Is that any help? :)
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Toby Booth♦Feb 28 '12 at 23:12

1 Answer
1

I'd fold this hand PF. You are playing heads-up OOP with a hand that does not fare well against her range, and is unlikely to win any decent pots with the bare TP.

You other actions are fine by me:

The call on the flop:

Folding here to the standard CBet would make no sense - what did you want to flop? And why wouldn't she bet a King dry flop with her entire range?

You don't know if you are ahead or behind, but raising to find that out is too expensive when you can probably find that out by calling and checking and seeing what she does on the turn. Small hand small pot.

The check on the turn

If you are ahead here, it's unlikely that she will call anything with a losing hand - so it's better to make a value bet on the river, when she may make a crying call with a pocket pair to snatch the 'obvious' bluff.

You don't fear much giving a free card here, because if she is behind, she probably has only 2 outs if she has a pocket pair, or 3 outs if she has an Ace; Maybe 5 outs if she has something like the 89s, but that's less likely.

The bet on the river

She has checked the turn and the river, and will suspect a bet from you may be a bluff - this is probably a good place for a thin value bet to extract value from a pocket pair. I'd probably fold if she raised here, but it would depend on the opponent.